she
wanted it. It has been on my mother's bureau ever since. I never noticed
anything curious about it until this evening." She looked, with a quiet
smile at Helen. "Probably you forgot that you had just blotted a letter
with it."

Helen started and went pale, but not so pale as her father, who went so
chalk-white that the wrinkles in his skin looked like make-up, against
its pallor.

"I was holding that blotter before the looking-glass this evening,"
Dorothy continued, in the same low tone, "and I saw that the ink had
transferred to the blotter a part of what you had written. I read it. It
was this: 'Father knew Santry had not killed Jensen....'"

The Senator moistened his lips with his tongue and strove to chuckle,
but the effort was a failure. Helen, however, appeared much relieved.

"I remember now," she said, "and I am well repaid for my moment of
sentiment. I was writing to my mother and was telling her of a scene
that had just taken place between Mr. Wade and my father. I did not
write what you read; rather, it was not all that I wrote. I
said--'Gordon thought that father knew Santry had not killed Jensen.'"

"Have you posted that letter?" her father asked, repressing as well as
he could his show of eagerness.

"No. I thought better about sending it. I have it upstairs."

"If you hadn't it, of course you could write it again, in any shape you
chose," Dorothy observed crisply, though she recognized, plainly enough,
that the explanation was at least plausible.

"There is nothing in that," Rexhill declared, when he had taken a deep
breath of relief. "Your championship of Wade is running away with you.
What other--er!--grave charges have you to bring against me?"

"I have one that is much more grave," she retorted, so promptly that he
could not conceal a fresh start of uneasiness. "This morning, Mr.
Trowbridge and I were out for a ride. We rode over to the place where
Jensen was shot, and Mr. Trowbridge found there a cartridge shell which
fits only one gun in Crawling Water. That gun belongs to a man named Tug
Bailey."

By now Rexhill was thoroughly aroused, for although he was too good a
jurist not to see the flaws in so incomplete a fabric of evidence
against him, he was impressed with the influence such a story would
exert on public opinion. If possible, this girl's tongue must be
stopped.

"Pooh!" He made a fine show of indifference. "Why bring such tales to
me? You'd make a very poor lawyer, young